


New Experiences

by luoup (ravenic)



Series: Team the Best Team [Platonic VLD Week 2.0] [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-28 17:52:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11423088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/luoup
Summary: Day 2 Prompt 2: New ExperiencesStargazing





	New Experiences

**Author's Note:**

> this one is actually in two parts: it was originally supposed to be split in two and fill Traditions and New Experiences both, but i decided i didn't like that and stuck them both into the second prompt. so Traditions will get filled separately at a later point sometime.

The stars were different in space.

This was obvious, of course, but somehow Keith didn’t think of it until he looked out the window of the castleship and realized he had no idea where he was. He had never seen any of these stars before. No humans had, unless Shiro or one of the Holts had gotten to look out a window while they were imprisoned. Even if that had happened, the stars would have been different there too.

In the desert, the nights had been almost as bright as daytime, especially with a full moon. But even on a moonless night, the stars had filled the sky, leaving darkness an inaccurate descriptor.

Keith had never been very interested in learning the traditional constellations. Stars were just stars – there weren’t any dogs or shoes or crowns or dragons in the sky. Sometimes Keith would lie on a sand dune and let his mind connect the dots however it liked. Who cared what a bunch of Greeks thought? He made new constellations each night, and forgot them each morning.

Everywhere he had moved all his life, the stars had been one of the few things that had stayed the same, no matter where he’d gone. They were a familiar background, unchanging regardless of how unstable his life felt. The only changes as the year passed, predictable and reliable.

He hadn’t realized how much stability the stars had given him until he was in an alien castle. They were in space, aliens were real (he _knew_ it!), Shiro was back, and they were meant to fight an intergalactic emperor who had had ten thousand years to establish control.

Keith looked up, and nothing was the same.

*

The stars were different in space.

Lance had always wanted to be a pilot. He’d learned everything he could about flying, and about the sky. Beyond the sky, too. He had learned all the constellations and would tell their stories to his little siblings at night, tracing out a compass or a horse or a harp against the blackness as they listened, wide-eyed.

Lance always slept with his curtains open. It made mornings hell, but getting to see the stars through the windows was so worth it. His brother that he shared the room with complained, sure (“Lance, they’re just stars. Go sleep outside if you want to see them so bad!”), but he didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, not ever. Even if he couldn’t see them, Lance knew that the stars were out there somewhere, and that was enough.

During the huge cookouts his parents held regularly, Lance would sit with his family, surrounded by all his siblings and far too many cousins to count, as the sun set late and summer-slow and the stars emerged like streetlights turning on one by one, filling the sky as the bright daylight had faded. The aunts and uncles would light lamps, but the stars were still visible above, glimmering quietly like masses of celestial fairy lights.

They were all gone, now. Family and stars both. Lance gazed at the sky of Arus and recognized nothing.

*

The stars were different in space.

Hunk loved the stars, even though he thought he would probably never go near them – too much motion sickness. But even from the ground they were beautiful. Tiny suns, millions of light-years away. He imagined all the worlds that circled them, the beings that maybe looked out from their homes, watching Sol, the sun, Earth’s star. Somewhere out there, stars meant life.

He would walk on the beach, long and far for hours on end. In one pocket or another he’d tuck a flashlight, but he never used it. Flashlights ruined the night, burned out the stars and left you night-blind except for the tiny cone of daytime-bright light they cast. The night became smaller when one turned on a flashlight. The stars gave enough light to walk a beach by, casting glitter on the waves and limning the sand with sparkles. The stars made the night huge.

He knew the bigger constellations and found them interesting enough, but he was also a scientist. Stars were just stars, and assigning them patterns and names was a purely human thing. Anyone could do it, from ancient Greeks to modern teenagers playing games at night. He did the same sometimes, naming cats and seashells and three-legged stools for his giggling little sister. His brother preferred the “real” constellations, as he called them, and Hunk would remind them that they were only as real as any other kind of constellation before launching into the story of whichever zodiac sign was visible that night, Leo or Pisces or Aries. Then he would call Aquarius a dorito chip and laugh when his brother swatted at him.

In the Blue Lion, he had watched the stars blur past and wondered if they were flying by Antares of Scorpio’s heart, or the starry spill of Aquarius’s water jar. In the end, it didn’t matter. They were far past any stars that could be seen from Earth. Hunk had left the world he’d known behind, constellations and siblings alike. Few things out here were familiar, even the stars.

*

The stars were different in space.  
Of course they were. Pidge was a million million lightyears away from Earth, she’d gone far past where any human could see from that planet. This was farther than anything her father had taught her, any science her mother had ever explained.

Pidge had been born for stars. Both her parents were astrophysicists. The sky had filled her mind from day one. When she was little, she had thought that her parents had come from from the stars, that they knew each and every one personally. She’d thought that they’d found her brother on a different planet, too – it would have explained how weird he was.

For years now Pidge had been all but nocturnal. She did her best work at night, she argued, and her parents had sighed and let her work. They had no room to talk – they of all people knew how inspiration worked. Besides, their own sleep schedules proved that she hadn’t gotten the impulse from nowhere. Sam used to say that in space, it was always night.

He’d been right. At least night had had stars, lighting Pidge’s room as she worked tirelessly on programs and robots. There were still stars out here, of course, but they had lost their familiarity. And Pidge had lost her family. Her mother on Earth, so far away. Her father and brother, out here somewhere but the universe was a huge place. The stars were uncountable, but the void between them was so much bigger. How could she find two tiny humans in an ocean of darkness? Pidge didn’t know how to build a robot for that.

Pidge was in the stars, and she was realizing that the universe was much bigger than she could ever have been prepared for. One only ever seems to think of stars when one thinks of space, but going there means learning that there is much more nothingness than somethingness, in space.

A million million stars, and somehow space still felt empty.

*

The stars were different in space.

Shiro had spent his life wanting to go to space. Humans had finally grown their wings and were ready to leave the nest, and Shiro wanted to fly.

So he flew. He studied books alone in his room for days, spent hours in the flight simulators, learned everything there was to learn. He wanted to be the best, and so he was. And it paid off. The Kerberos Mission was announced, and the youngest pilot ever was selected to fly humans to Pluto’s moon for the first time in all of history.

He’d done it. Shiro flew to the stars, and it was wonderful right up until the moment when they learned they were not alone, and that the stars had other inhabitants far more powerful than humans were.

He didn’t remember much about that year. Looking at his body, his hair and his face and his arm, maybe that was a good thing. He didn’t remember moving around, though he must have done a good deal of travel as the Champion. He didn’t remember the stars changing, but now everywhere they went, the sky was strange. He’d made it past the sky, but nothing was familiar.

Shiro had spent his life dreaming of the stars, but now that he was among them they felt cold and cruel. Sometimes, all he could dream of was the planet he’d been born on. The stars were just points of light circled by planets of people that were not his own. They were not home, and now home was all he could think of.

* * *

* * * * *

* * *

The Castle of Lions was deep in space, far away from any planet, star or other celestial body. Around them was just that – space. The blackest of blacks, perforated by stars bright and dim, near and far. Out here, there were more than could be counted in any language, leaving the mind almost overwhelmed by the simultaneous emptiness and fullness of true space.

Within the castleship, seven beings watched the stars. The last two Alteans in the universe and five of the only humans around for lightyears sat together in a room that bore windows for three-quarters of its walls, watching the stars drift past in the darkness.

Every one of them was far from home. Not a single person in the room had ever seen these stars before. The body Paladins had never left Earth before the Blue Lion had spirited them away to the castle, and Shiro hadn’t exactly had time to stargaze while being a warrior-prisoner for the Galra. Alteans had traveled long and far, but space is a big place and ten thousand years was enough for even stars to change, so not even Allura or Coran recognized these stars.

Somehow, that made it better. The humans had never been this far in space before – no human ever had – but even the ancient advanced spacefaring alien race was just as lost as they were. They were all lost, just a little bit.

It could easily have been a melancholy evening, saddened by the memories of watching different stars with different people, far away and long ago. But although the memories were present, the contentment of being with these people, now, was good enough.

Lance was trying to explain the concept of the Zodiac to the Alteans. It wasn’t going quite as well as he might have hoped.

“But why a bucket?” Allura asked, looking genuinely perplexed. “What does it mean to be born beneath the sign of a bucket? Would they be good at carrying things?”  
“No, no, no,” Lance cried, waving his hands. “Aquarius was the water-bearer for the gods, and besides it’s not as literal as that.”

“I think the important question is what exactly is a feesh and why there are two of them,” Coran argued. “Also, are all five of you born in the Lion symbol? That would be most reasonable, it would seem.”

“I’m a Leo, yeah,” Lance said proudly, “but everyone else is different. We weren’t all born in the same month or anything.”

“Hm,” Coran mused playfully. “Maybe we ought to track down some other Humans to be the pilots. We can’t be having Voltron turn into mostly a lion and partly a bucket, after all. I don’t think that a bucket would defeat Zarkon terribly well, unless Galra have a weakness to water.”

Their conversation devolved until it became a ridiculous debate between Lance and Coran on what kind of bucket held water best and why, with Allura watching the verbal ping-pong and trying not to laugh.

Hunk and Pidge were in a whispered argument over what stars precisely should be linked into their spontaneous new constellations. Keith hadn’t been paying much attention, but it seemed that everything had been fine until Pidge’s Olkari-crown constellation overlapped with Hunk’s Balmera-crystal one. Now they were just bickering, squabbling over stars and apparently all but ready to go make Shiro decide it for them.

“I’ve made a constellation for Red and her paws take up all of those stars,” he said flatly into the argument. “They’re mine, and I’ll fight both of you for them.”

Pidge and Hunk looked him, then at each other, and shrugged identically. “Lions take precedence,” Hunk explained, before getting dragged off into another debate as Pidge named a vast field of stars the Castle of Lions and Hunk demanded to know how and where the structure was formed.

Keith sighed and gave it up for lost. The stars were just stars, after all. And the castleship was still moving; in a few days none of the forms they saw now would be the same. He glanced over to make sure his real goal had been accomplished. Good. Shiro was still asleep.

The Black Paladin had explained the origin of what formed the basics of Human constellations – an ancient culture called the Greeks that had drawn their myths into the stars – and talked with Pidge about something space-related and scientific before falling knock-out asleep on a pile of pillows. It meant that nobody else got any pillows, but they were all so relieved to see Shiro actually sleeping that everyone was fully willing to use the blankets instead, minus the violet one Hunk had spread over Shiro.

Shiro’s quiet breaths hadn’t quite escalated into snores yet. For once he looked relaxed, and not a one of them had any problems with letting him sleep. As beautiful as the stars were, Shiro getting some real rest was far more valuable. They were in space, after all – stars were everywhere, and sleep was rare for the Defenders of the Universe.

The stars were different in space. Sitting in the castleship, gazing into the deep dark fields of distant lights, it was obvious how far away every single one of them were from home. But even if the stars were different, stargazing was much the same whether it was from a beach or bedroom on Earth or an alien spaceship in the open void. And even if family was far away, watching stars could be shared with friends too.

The deep open darkness that made space space, the pinpricks of brightness that signaled stars and the worlds orbiting them so far away – this was the universe they were protecting.

**Author's Note:**

> yes, lance is actually a leo. i was not expecting that.


End file.
